this extraordinary piece of pantomime, we should have buttoned up our hearts and pockets forthwith?  Sentiment, again, sails very near the wind of the ludicrous in the reply to the Traveller’s remark that the mourner had been a merciful master to the dead ass.  “Alas!” the latter says, “I thought so when he was alive, but now that he is dead I think otherwise.  I fear the weight of myself and my afflictions have been too much for him.”  And the scene ends flatly enough with the scrap of morality:  “‘Shame on the world!’ said I to myself.  ’Did we love each other as this poor soul loved his ass, ‘twould be something.’”

The whole incident, in short, is one of those examples of the deliberate-pathetic with which Sterne’s highly natural art had least, and his highly artificial nature most, to do.  He is never so unsuccessful as when, after formally announcing, as it were, that he means to be touching, he proceeds to select his subject, to marshal his characters, to group his accessories, and with painful and painfully apparent elaboration to work up his scene to the weeping point.  There is no obviousness of suggestion, no spontaneity of treatment about this “Dead Ass” episode; indeed, there is some reason to believe that it was one of those most hopeless of efforts—­the attempt at the mechanical repetition of a former triumph.  It is by no means improbable, at any rate, that the dead ass of Nampont owes its presence in the Sentimental Journey to the reception met with by the live ass of Lyons in the seventh volume of Tristram Shandy.  And yet what an astonishing difference between the two sketches!

“’Twas a poor ass, who had just turned in, with a couple of large panniers upon his back, to collect eleemosynary turnip-tops and cabbage-leaves, and stood dubious with his two fore-feet on the inside of the threshold, and with his two hinder feet towards the street, as not knowing very well whether he would go in or no.  Now, ’tis an animal (be in what hurry I may) I cannot bear to strike.  There is a patient endurance of sufferings wrote so unaffectedly in his looks and carriage, which pleads so mightily for him that it always disarms me, and to that degree that I do not like to speak unkindly to him; on the contrary, meet him where I will, in town or country, in cart or under panniers, whether in liberty or bondage, I have ever something civil to say to him on my part; and, as one word begets another (if he has as little to do as I), I generally fall into conversation with him; and surely never is my imagination so busy as in framing his responses from the etchings of his countenance—­and where those carry me not deep enough, in flying from my own heart into his, and feeling what is natural for an ass to think, as well as a man, upon the occasion....  Come, Honesty! said I, seeing it was impracticable to pass betwixt him and the gate, art thou for coming in or going out?  The ass twisted his head round,